Le renouveau de l’approche stratégique européenne en Afrique de l’Ouest

Europe and Africa are historically linked, nonetheless Africa did not line up behind the EU during the Russia-Ukraine crisis. This is a strong stance on the part of African countries in a global context of anti-Western sentiments’ rise in West Africa. Nonetheless, in the recent years there has been a desire to renew and rethink the EU-Africa relationship in order to move away from the aid-centred relation which was held since the independencies and was heavily criticised. The renewal was initiated under Jean-Claude Juncker and has been pursued by Ursula Von der Leyen, who has made it one of the priorities of her term of office. In March 2020 the new EU strategy for Africa was presented, and at the last EU-AU summit in February 2022, the other instruments that the EU is going to deploy in Africa as part of this strategic renewal were presented. I wanted to find out, throughout this work, to what extent they had been taken into account and mobilised by the European delegation in Senegal. And I was then able to conclude that the main guidelines of the new European strategy for Africa have been taken into account by the Delegation in defining the main priorities of its joint strategy in Senegal, just as the national priorities defined by the Senegalese authorities in the « Plan Sénégal Émergent ». I was also able to observe that the Delegation is mobilising the new implementation and financing instruments of the new strategic approach in the main projects it is carrying out in the country, since most of the projects are financed by the new financial instrument NDICI, as part of the Global Gateway initiative, and are implemented by the Team Europe in Senegal.